on Derwent water
by swans-a-melting
Summary: From imagineyourotp on tumblr: "Imagine your OTP have rented a boat on a lake. Neither wants to admit they've never rowed a boat before to the other." Rosamund and Vera do just that.


"_**Imagine your OTP have rented a boat on a lake. Neither wants to admit they've never rowed a boat before to the other."**_

"Are you sure you've done this before?" Vera Bates eyed the redhead dubiously as she fumbled with the oars. "You don't look like you 'ave."

"I know what I'm doing," Rosamund panted, fixing her lover with a defiant glare as she pulled the oars through the water, trying her hardest to force them to stay beneath the surface. "I'm the daughter of an Earl; I've had plenty of experience!" Well, if lying back in a boat pretending to be Ophelia (_no mama, of course I aren't a romantic!) _in the Midsummer heat whilst some dull suitor steered it around the lake on his father's estate whilst their mothers kept a watchful eye counted as experience then Rosamund certainly had had lots of it. Unfortunately all the suitors provided had all been too gallant to ever let her try, and now she was ashamed to admit that this was the first time she had ever even touched an oar with her bare hands.

"Oh you do, do you?" was the Irishwoman's retort. "You don't look like it t' me!"

Rosamund merely scowled, continuing to manipulate the implements through the water. This was all quite frankly ridiculous anyway. She hadn't come on holiday to the Lake District to make a fool of herself in a boat, she'd come to _relax_, and enjoy herself with the woman she loved. Although, looking across at Vera's face smirking at her incompetence, she definitely thought that there were far more apt ways she could happily describe her now.

So far all they had managed to do was float around in circles whilst Rosamund jabbed ineffectually at the water. Losing patience, she shoved down with the oars as hard as she could, but lost her grip at the last moment and the venture ended in nothing but spraying herself with quite a large portion of Derwent Water. Her cheeks flamed. She could practically hear the man they'd rented the damn vessel from in the first place laughing at them over on the bank.

"Face it, Rosamund," Vera sighed, lying back in the boat, fishing a cigarette out of her pocket and lighting up. "You don't 'ave a clue what to do." She studied her lover calmly, deliberately teasing Rosamund and hardening her tone to simply rile her even more. Rosamund was always such a _pleasure_ to tease, always so self-righteous and putout, her thin lips resolutely curving down into a sulky little pout.

"Me Da used to take me out in 'is dingy a fair bit," Vera fabricated nonchalantly, tapping ash from the end of her fag on the side of the boat. "I've known how to do this since a young age," she said, blithely ignoring the fact she'd grown up in inner city Dublin without a Da or even a lake nearby, and the secondary piece of information that Rosamund knew all about this very well. But Rosamund seemed to not be thinking of that now, and it was better to tell her this than admitting to Ros she'd never even been in a boat at all.

"I have known since I was young too," Rosamund said. "Don't look at me like that!" she added as Vera raised a sceptical eyebrow across from her. "I just haven't had a lot of practise in a long time."

"A very long time," Vera smirked, and Rosamund scowled, infuriated by the other woman's sudden seeming expert knowledge on manning a rowing boat. "You do it then, Vera," she snapped. "I don't care anymore.

She dropped the oars, folding her arms and was just about to subject herself to Vera's rowing, when the dark haired woman suddenly began squawking and grabbing at the oars, groaning loudly as one of them sank beneath the surface and out of sight. In her anger, Rosamund had forgotten that if you dropped the oars then they slipped through the worn-out notches, and got lost in the murky water below. Vera, in her casual insolence, had not noticed until the very last moment, managing to save only one. Rosamund hadn't even been looking what she was doing.

Rosamund let out a long breath of irritation, smacking the seat with her fist. "And how, may I ask, are we going to get back to shore now?" she demanded. "Because I aren't yellin' for 'im over on the bank," – here she jerked her thumb in the general direction of the boat-keeper, "and I'm not flappin' my hanky at him like some stranded heroine in one of Cara's romance novels either," she huffed angrily, not noticing Rosamund's look of glee despite the situation at hand. Vera did tend to look like a disgruntled cat at times when things didn't go her way, and it rather charmed Rosamund to see her so.

"Sorry."

"Hmph. You should be," was the retort, but glancing upwards Vera couldn't help but notice the genuine apology in Rosamund's pale eyes. "Apology accepted," she mumbled. She may not have been the most forgiving woman in the world but if she couldn't forgive Rosamund for something trivial like this then surely something was wrong!

It may have been Rosamund's fault that they were now stuck out here with no obvious way of getting back, but Vera was surprised to find she didn't blame her at all. Neither woman was fond of showing weakness; it was something to do with Rosamund's age old inferiority complex inbred in her thanks to a slight lack of maternal affection, and Vera's general scathing contempt for displays of pathetic behaviour as she called it. But this Vera could excuse – when she knew full well she couldn't have rowed the boat any better if she'd tried.

"_You've gone soft, Vera Bates_," she thought to herself. "_Living with this damn aristocrat has turned you soft_." And yet Vera was beginning to wonder if maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. She shook her thoughts away with a sigh. It wasn't time to be dwelling on those now. "So what're we goin' to do now?" She gestured towards the lone oar thinking apologetically against the boats side. "We can't row with just that."

"No," Rosamund agreed, glancing back to the shoreline. "The boatman's gone into his hut," she observed. "We can't get his attention onto us." She pondered a moment, and then smirked slightly. "Well, we could always punt back," she suggested. "I've seen people do it on the Thames." She doubted entirely that it would work, but she needed to say something! She couldn't punt any more than she could row, but she doubted it was that hard. Or maybe Vera had even more tricks up her sleeve?

"I think you've gone mad, Ros," Vera said calmly, tossing her spent cigarette overboard. "I say we just make the best of it now."

"Make the best of it?"

"Yeah. The best of a bad situation." Vera wriggled off the bench and into the bottom of the boat where their picnic blanket was from earlier, and stretched it out, rubbing away a few stray crumbs and curling like a cat in one corner. "Why not go to sleep for a bit?" she said. She raised an eyebrow and smirked. "It'll make a nice change." Rosamund laughed loudly, realising now that maybe being stranded in still waters on a blazing hot day did have its perks after all."

"Alright," she consented. "I'll come and be your pillow." Rosamund hitched her leaf green dress up around her knees (as so not to spoil the silk), and huddled up next to Vera, proving not just to be a very adept pillow, but a wonderful blanket too.

###

It was the boatman who got them out of it, in the end. Suddenly irate that his boat hadn't come back after the hour it had been rented for, he'd been rather startled to notice it seemingly empty and with only one oar drifting serenely further out, and thus he'd jumped into a boat of his own and rowed out as fast as he could to check that the occupants hadn't somehow accidentally drowned themselves in the lake, or got into any sort of bother like that.

However, peering in he'd only found two women sat sleepily in the bottom ("thank god we'd woken up by that point!" Rosamund said later, and once they'd explained their predicament he merely snorted and helped them out into his boat, where he attached theirs to the back of his with a crowbar and set off for land, looking like he wanted to laugh all the way.

Rosamund sat at the boat's prow, pale and cool, her society mask of no emotion slapped on her face, and Vera scowling mutinously at the fact they'd had to accept help from the man after all. He let them out after having the sheer bloody audacity of making them pay for the extra hour they'd spent sleeping stranded out on the glistening blue ("got to make a profit from somewhere, ladies!"), in a venture that had gone from apparent disaster to something very pleasant indeed.

**A/N: Yeah I ****know this is ridiculously**** lame but I wrote it at like half one in the morning when I couldn't sleep the other day so it's not exactly going to be Shakespeare. Reviews are always appreciated, if you have the time!**


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